open access linguistics

Month: October 2015

On 11th October 2015, Lingua editor Johan Rooryck posted the following on his Facebook wall:

Last week, the editors of Lingua wrote a letter to Elsevier in order to renegotiate our collaboration. We asked for the following: 1) The journal is transferred to full Open Access status, 2) Article Processing Charges (APCs) cost 400 euros, 3) The copyright of articles remains with the authors, 4) The journal henceforth operates under a cc-by licence, 5) Ownership of the journal is transferred to the collective of editors at no cost. We define these conditions as Fair Open Access.
Should Elsevier not accept our conditions, we will be forced to set up a new linguistics journal elsewhere.

Such a move is now a real possibility thanks to a new organization called Linguistics in Open Access (Ling-OA) (http://www.lingoa.eu, website live tomorrow), Facebook: Linguistics in Open Access). Ling-OA is a non-profit foundation representing linguistics journals who wish to publish under the conditions of Fair Open Access. The journals LabPhon and Journal of Portuguese Linguistics have already decided to join this foundation.

Ling-OA has obtained financial guarantees to cover APCs for the first 5 years, provided by the Association of Dutch Universities (VSNU) and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). It enjoys further support from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). The impact of the journals in transition will be monitored by CWTS Leiden (http://www.cwts.nl).

The journals will be published by Ubiquity Press with the Open Library of Humanities as a long-term sustainability partner. OLH, whose platform is also provided by Ubiquity Press, will guarantee the continued publication of the journals associated with LingOA after the first five years through its consortial library funding model. OLH is a charitable organisation dedicated to publishing Open Access scholarship with no author-facing APCs (https://www.openlibhums.org). This will provide long-term sustainability for Fair Open Access journals, ensuring that no researcher will ever have to pay for APCs out of their own pocket.